Monday, 26 August 2013

The Payphone Story

There are only three songs in all the world, one’s about
love, one’s about death and the other one’s about Kate Bush.Also, there are only
seven stories – so it shouldn’t come as a great surprise that characters and
locations overlap from time to time.

Many of us will age and expand in an occasional grocery shop near to the sea – this doesn’t mean we’ll all end up believing that the
Doctor’s probably real.Dozens of young people gleefully told a crumpled careers advisor
they wanted to spend their taxable years writing comics (not at the same time,
that’s the plot to the eighth story)
but it doesn’t mean that they were all using the opportunity to vent hormonal arrogance rebelling against
something loathed as a result of circumstance.There are more stories in which the young protagonist
has read an entire library - Moonshadow
is one that leaps to mind - than there are bootleg Hawkwind albums.But only just.

There were two sets of directionally-designated stairs in
the school’s main building, and at the bottom of the ‘escape’ set was a
dimly-lit, concrete cave created by the overhanging steps.The Payphone itself clung to the cave wall next
to the reprographics room and the air there always tasted inky.

School itself was tedious and vicious in roughly equal
amounts and got in the way of reading.Back
then we weren’t riding dinosaurs to school because of a noble sacrifice I’d
made by accident.On the whole this had
been forgotten, but that didn’t mean I’d suddenly become popular.Music came later, but that was
really just a way of wandering off-script and into a paranoid tangle of
improvisation and apparent peer-approval, triggered by the realisation that you
didn’t actually need any musical ability to be a vocalist.

Every character in this interactive version of School Fun had
their different ways of getting through the compulsory quagmire of
comprehensive education: some would look for open windows; others imposed a
Python-based reading to create a bearable everyday surreality; some pushed the
boundaries of social acceptability and others just got on with it, or enjoyed
sport.

Computers were still mostly a madman’s manufactured dream,
oozing from the BBC’s Dystopian R&D Department.Somehow, real world proto-cheat-codes had
evolved - later on they would mutate into
the symbolic, species-crossing endoparasite we all love, but we don’t need to
go into that here.These were simple times
of great potential when everything was either meat, plastic, shellac, paper or
metal.Reality was still up for grabs
and someone - it was never clear who, but I always thought that wearing a Judge
Death badge was a bit risky – had discovered that by inputting a secret code
into any normal payphone you could make it ring forever.

One of the minor characters in my personal adventure is about
to make his first appearance, he’s just changing out of his punk journalist
disguise at the moment.While we’re
waiting for him to get ready, I thought we might have a quick chat about rivers
and time.

There’s something about the water cycle that always appealed
to me.I like the way that water just
keeps going round and around like energy and stories.It might change size and shape and location
but it always comes back to the original combination of hydrogen and oxygen
eventually.I also like the idea that Glasgow’s main export,
after superheroes, is the same stuff that splashed all over the dinosaurs’ feathers.Until it reminds me that I’m responsible for
wiping them out in the first place and that makes me sad, so I’ll try and
conjure an analogy about streams being tributaries of story leading to a river
but that won’t work so I’ll shift angles and try to funnel water into a metaphor
for our individual narratives and-

Mate, I’m dying out here.Can you hurry up and get that jacket on?

Okay, he’s ready now.

There was something wrong with the Payphone in the
cave.All through lunchtime the rumours
had crawled from inmate to inmate like lice.By the time they’d reached me, the nuisance novelty had worn skin-thin
for the giggling group clustered in the shelter of the escape stairs.I arrived just as the end-of-lunch bell
rang.The crowd crumbled, falling back
to registration classes in preparation for the afternoon’s grey trudge toward
the nineties.

The sixth-former with the Judge Death badge finished his
call, saw me standing there and held the handset toward me.His head tilted slightly and he grinned.

“Yeah, cheers.” I took hold of the handset and
tried not to appear too Alzarian.“What
do I do?”

“Press the ‘next call’ button, wait for the dial tone and
then just ring – when you’re finished, press ‘next call’ again – just don’t
hang up.”He was looking very pleased
with himself.

“And it’ll do what?”

“It’s knackered.The
longer you stay on the call the more credit you build up.”And with that he left me holding a hacked telephone,
standing in a cave that was going to be empty for the next fifteen
minutes.

With great power comes great responsibility, as no-one ever
said ever.So, who could I call then?

As a result of writing letters to people who may never have really
existed, I’d managed to start a bit of a correspondence with some of the gods
who made British comics happen, and because of this had a selection of secret
numbers written in the back of the notebook I carried everywhere.I looked through the stringy digits, trying
to decide which combination to summon.By now I was burning up, my cheeks stang and flop-sweat was spotting the
shaking notebook.

In the end I settled on the code attached to the most
obscure name, more of a hemi-demi-semi-god at this point in psychogeology and
therefore the one least likely to shout my face off.Repeating the digit blocks of code out loud I
input them firmly, one after the other, into the clay of the future.

The queue’s like a still summer river, all gentle expectant
bubbling and trickling susurrations.I’m
bobbing in the tide with my PA, buoyed up by the contents of my bag.Someone opens the door and the river flows
forward smoothly, undulating around the square named after King George
III’s favourite ladies and sometimes a Cure single.The river slowly becomes a lake; we wash up in the shallow end.

For the next sixty minutes I’m taken on a guided tour of
everything I got up to when I was meant to be watching Doctor Who.Black orchids; shocks from the future; the
unexpected autograph on the twentieth Redfox; M*****man’s sudden appearance in
my hometown, the black screaming horror that can be packed into twenty-four
hours; dreaming my way through college and into music via London Below; sharing
other mothers and mirrors that aren’t with the Him. And I remember that sweat tastes like the
ocean and tears at the same time, regardless of whether it’s honest or
shameful.

The lockgates open again after a hour and the lake gushes
back out to form a new river that’s made up with all the same stories as the
first one.It moves muddily at first,
allowing Ian Rankin to make an unexpected cameo before he’s swept away to
honour a genius.Gradually, the river
begins to pick up speed. Soon we’re being buffeted headlong into the rapids
before tipping, white-knuckled, over the precipice and into the broiling
maelstrom.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d remember, but I’ve been
waiting twenty-two years to apologise for phoning you at home.”

It’s the second time we’ve had a crossover, and we both know
that it’s quite a coup for me. There’s a pause.

“No, I remember.It
only ever happened once.”

“Well, I’d still like to say ‘sorry’.”

He laughs and extends his hand.I shake it and then climb out of the pool onto
the street where Alexander Graham Bell was born and into the fog that’s rolling
in from tomorrow.

There is no such thing as reality.There is only perception.

- Gustave Flaubert

Fig 1.M*****man 18 - page 23. Escape stairs highlighted.

Fig 2. M*****man 21 - page 27. Author's other home pictured to left of bandstand. Magnifying glass and imagination not supplied.